Design and development projects naturally require a certain degree of collaboration among the projects' participants. Complex projects and projects in technological areas requiring high expertise, such as developing, maintaining and operating IC (integrated circuit) design environments or co-developing IC's, typically require a high degree of collaboration and communication. In cases in which more than one company work together on a project, the challenges are greater with respect to providing engineering teams with the efficiency of working together as if they are one company, while providing the security necessitated by the fact that they are not one company. For example, updating and maintaining a design environment has become more and more complex with diminishing feature sizes and the increase in the complexity of the designs. Therefore, it is desirable to provide a collaboration environment in which project participants (typically engineers) can interact, communicate, and design and develop their products, while also providing a secure environment in which each company's intranet and intellectual property are protected from the other company and in which project-specific information and intellectual property are protected from unauthorized individuals within any of the respective companies.
Previous collaboration approaches have united project teams via mail, teleconferencing, video conferencing, joint project plans, and frequent face-to-face meetings. Later innovations such as e-mail and file exchange protocols (e.g., file transport protocol, or FTP), have improved the immediacy of communication through use of networks, specifically the Internet. More recent advances, such as X Display in an X Window System, WebEx, and NetMeeting, utilize a cross-platform, client/server system for managing a windowed graphical user interface in a distributed network, thereby allowing someone to view someone else's desktop without physically traveling to the desktop site.
None of the foregoing approaches have approximated the efficiency that teams working together physically can achieve. For example, e-mail and FTP approaches are difficult to manage in view of the magnitude of common files associated with an IC engineering project, and are thus error-prone. Additionally, complex problems are difficult to address and solve through e-mail and FTP communication alone because the problems are often embedded in the design environments, which often differ from site to site and company to company. For another example, use of telnet technology allows one to run tools or applications on another site and to view text results, but does not support the graphical communication required in complex engineering projects. Remote viewing techniques do exist that can address the absence of graphical communication by allowing an offsite engineer to view the problem in its native context, but the majority of remote viewing techniques are run on operating systems not typically used in complex IC design projects.
Of course, co-location of engineering teams from different companies can provide the desired efficiencies, but it is often not feasible to co-locate personnel for geographical, cost, and logistical reasons. Furthermore, co-location incurs the problems of constraining the engineers to working only on the joint project and of isolating them from the rest of their organization.
Based on the foregoing, it is clearly desirable to provide an environment in which multiple companies or parties can remotely collaborate on an engineering or other project. There is a further need to provide a secure collaboration environment in which the companies are able to restrict access to only certain information, and to restrict access to only certain people.